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1PREFACE bread. Loveless, self-centred, torn altogether from its connection with the whole, the soul may still live the surface-life of sense or thought or reason, but its grasp on reality is relaxed, as it were, in spiritual death: “Though 1 understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, and have not love, I am nothing "—the veriest nonentity, a withered leaf snatched by the breeze from the living bough. In this deeper sense itis true to say that union is the condition of disáinctness; and society, of personality. “We are nothing else but wills," says Augustine, Nihil aliud sumus quam voluntates. A man is, in his veriest issf ^to love" ; if he have not love he is nothing—he is as reality, what he loves; with him “to be’ a sounding brass or tinkling cymbal compared with a living cry from the heart; appearance, not reality. The fulness, therefore, of a man’s life is to be measured by the number of persons and groups of persons in whom his affections are interested—by the nature, depth, and variety of those affections, whether of sympathy or antipathy, of love or of aversion; and the whole movement and life of this world of wills, like that of motes in a sunbeam, or of the star-dust that swims in space, is one of ceaseless shiftings and mutual adjustments, whereby, through a maze of seemingly lawless confusion, vii
2PREFACE each will finds at last its predestined orbit in the spiritual universe. Hence it is that a man is estimated chiefly by his relation to others; by his likes, his dislikes, and his indifferences, which make him what he is, be it great or little, good or evil. Hence, too, that sense of spiritual enlargement and re-enforcement on the onc hand, and on the other, of impoverishment and contraction, according as our will is drawn into closer communion with others, or driven away into isolation and estrangement. Hence, once more, the firm Non omnis moriar of him who, by identifying himself with that * Living Will which shall endure when all that seems shall suffer shock," has laid hold of eternal life and reality, and has embraced an imperishable cause. As man lives his narrow bodily life in the bosom of Nature long before he understands her at all comprehensively, or rises to that belief in her unity as a single system which so multiplies his power of dealing with her and drawing on her bounty ; so too he is bound by the bonds of a blind rudimentary charity to the world of wills and personalities long before he rises to a clear conception of that sovereign and central will, over all and through all, by which alone the rest are explained and brought into one coherent self-suffieing system. When the law of Love is thus discerned in its universality as the vin Ba $ | | PREFACE
3Alpha and Omega of all spiritual movement, controlling the seeming chaos of conflicting wills to its own irresistible purpose, then are the possibilities of man’s inward life multiplied in the same degree as those of his outward life have been multiplied by the conceptions of physical science. Thus it is that religion answers the problem as to the meaning of man’s deepest life—the life of those personal affections and sympathies by which we are endlessly opposed and re-united, sorted and re-sorted, into groups and sub-groups: “ Wit it well! Love is the meaning "—a Divine Love which gives us a standard and criterion whereby to discern between love and love, and to guide our feet through the labyrinth of warring affections into the way of peace. It is in furnishing such practical guidance that a doctrine or doctrinal system possesses religious truth and value as distinct from that which is merely scientific, historical, or ethical. For one reason or another its coherence with the rest of our knowledge and understanding may be at times, or in points, hard to establish ; but eventually all our theories of the world, visible and invisible, are but instruments of life, practical ways of taking things so as to use and control them to our profit. Nor should we ever, in case of conflict, be swayed by mere reasoning to disbelieve what experiment had proved true. At the ix PREFACE
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
1PREFACE bread. Loveless, self-centred, torn altogether from its connection with the whole, the soul may still live the surface-life of sense or thought or reason, but its grasp on reality is relaxed, as it were, in spiritual death: “Though 1 understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, and have not love, I am nothing "—the veriest nonentity, a withered leaf snatched by the breeze from the living bough. In this deeper sense itis true to say that union is the condition of disáinctness; and society, of personality. “We are nothing else but wills," says Augustine, Nihil aliud sumus quam voluntates. A man is, in his veriest issf ^to love" ; if he have not love he is nothing—he is as reality, what he loves; with him “to be’ a sounding brass or tinkling cymbal compared with a living cry from the heart; appearance, not reality. The fulness, therefore, of a man’s life is to be measured by the number of persons and groups of persons in whom his affections are interested—by the nature, depth, and variety of those affections, whether of sympathy or antipathy, of love or of aversion; and the whole movement and life of this world of wills, like that of motes in a sunbeam, or of the star-dust that swims in space, is one of ceaseless shiftings and mutual adjustments, whereby, through a maze of seemingly lawless confusion, vii
2PREFACE each will finds at last its predestined orbit in the spiritual universe. Hence it is that a man is estimated chiefly by his relation to others; by his likes, his dislikes, and his indifferences, which make him what he is, be it great or little, good or evil. Hence, too, that sense of spiritual enlargement and re-enforcement on the onc hand, and on the other, of impoverishment and contraction, according as our will is drawn into closer communion with others, or driven away into isolation and estrangement. Hence, once more, the firm Non omnis moriar of him who, by identifying himself with that * Living Will which shall endure when all that seems shall suffer shock," has laid hold of eternal life and reality, and has embraced an imperishable cause. As man lives his narrow bodily life in the bosom of Nature long before he understands her at all comprehensively, or rises to that belief in her unity as a single system which so multiplies his power of dealing with her and drawing on her bounty ; so too he is bound by the bonds of a blind rudimentary charity to the world of wills and personalities long before he rises to a clear conception of that sovereign and central will, over all and through all, by which alone the rest are explained and brought into one coherent self-suffieing system. When the law of Love is thus discerned in its universality as the vin Ba $ | | PREFACE
3Alpha and Omega of all spiritual movement, controlling the seeming chaos of conflicting wills to its own irresistible purpose, then are the possibilities of man’s inward life multiplied in the same degree as those of his outward life have been multiplied by the conceptions of physical science. Thus it is that religion answers the problem as to the meaning of man’s deepest life—the life of those personal affections and sympathies by which we are endlessly opposed and re-united, sorted and re-sorted, into groups and sub-groups: “ Wit it well! Love is the meaning "—a Divine Love which gives us a standard and criterion whereby to discern between love and love, and to guide our feet through the labyrinth of warring affections into the way of peace. It is in furnishing such practical guidance that a doctrine or doctrinal system possesses religious truth and value as distinct from that which is merely scientific, historical, or ethical. For one reason or another its coherence with the rest of our knowledge and understanding may be at times, or in points, hard to establish ; but eventually all our theories of the world, visible and invisible, are but instruments of life, practical ways of taking things so as to use and control them to our profit. Nor should we ever, in case of conflict, be swayed by mere reasoning to disbelieve what experiment had proved true. At the ix PREFACE
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
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